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3.
Cháu thành thằng bé ngồi vừa lòng ông?
Nhưng tôi không biết làm thơ. Tôi chỉ ao ước, giá ông bà tôi còn sống… tôi sẽ hỏi ông bà thật
nhiều về lịch sử, về quá khứ của Việt Nam thế kỷ 20: thời Pháp thuộc, những ngày tháng căng
thẳng tiền khởi nghĩa, cách mạng mùa thu 1945, tạm chiếm, cuộc đấu tranh thầm lặng của người
dân trong lòng thành phố, bộ đội về thủ đô, ký hiệp định hai miền chia cắt, dòng người tản cư,
tiếng mẹ gào gọi con, những đêm Khâm Thiên lửa đỏ trời, chiến thắng rộn rã, rồi bo bo, cơm
độn, gạo tấm, những mảnh tem phiếu…
Rồi tôi sẽ hỏi ông: Người ta có nên yêu nước, nên gắn bó với đất nước không ông?
Hà Nội, buổi chiều trống rỗng 21/8/2011
http://www.phamdoantrang.com/2011/08/troi-vao-thu-viet-nam-buon-lam-em-oi.html
-------
“WHEN AUTUMN COMES, THAT ONE SAD PLACE IS
VIETNAM, MY DEAR!”
 Translated by Trần Quỳnh Vi
First day of autumn. The lifeless sunshine. One empty soul.
Two years ago around this same time, the feeling was similar. Under the bright sunshine and one
blue sky, yet all that I could feel was my weariness and a sense of ultimate emptiness. Only then,
I came to truly understand the state of mind of the poet who wrote: “I kept walking, unable to see
the town or any of its homes. Before my very own eyes, only raindrops kept falling on the color
of the red flag.”
I have never experienced such feeling in this utmost distinctiveness: My very own hometown,
right at this moment has ceased from being my own.
My native hometown, the place where I have memorized every old, broken bricked and peeled
off wall, every street corner busied with small shops, every French styled window, every deep
green shadow made by the Khaya wood trees each winter that would fully awake once spring
came… The town where my “Tây An Nam” 1 friends and I have become so attached to and
where we have treasured it so much that we would not want to destroy even just one of its leaves
or one of its road bricks because we have always felt that Hanoi and Vietnam have become such
fragile bodies that continuously being crushed.
Such emotion, perhaps, cannot be called patriotism as we only dare to consider it an attachment.
We have become so accustomed to its beauty, loveliness, and purity to love even the cluttered
and unkempt space of our native land. The more we look at it, witness it, and experience it, the
more we come to love it…
1 A slang term used by the young people of Hanoi, Vietnam to describe Vietnamese people who do not think, act,
or behave like a typical Vietnamese, but more like foreigners or people who belong to another realm.

4.
Such a town has now ceased from being my own. It has become the private realm of uneducated
persons with red bands wrapped around their arms and the whistles readily to sound off on their
puffing mouths; of the secret agents and police officers in uniforms or plain clothes, overly
confident; of those “who’s who” that we all knew of, with their shameless faces and their
increasingly fattened up bellies.
In such a realm, those people have an absolute right to act according to how they feel like. They
can put tens of those banners which state “Crowd Gathering is Strictly Prohibited” in the back of
their cars, tour around the city, and when and if they feel like it, they can just drop off those
banners at the city’s garden, park, lake, or at the base of the Ly Thai To statute. They can grab
one’s shirt, lift one up by the shoulders, or pull away the arms of those unarmed youths to drag
them onto their buses to be improperly taken to the police station, and yet their mouths
unctuously announced: “We are inviting you to come along, we are not arresting anyone”. Dear
Lord, would any of us ever invite another person in such manner?
Under the broad, wide and fully insured helmet named “homeland security,” they can listen to
telephone conversations, entrap emails, and entrap chat messages of any individual or
organization whom they have concerns with. Those activities would have to be authorized by a
court of law or a prosecution office in other countries. However, in this private realm which
belongs to those people, sometimes all that they need is the fact that they are members of a
specific profession.
And there are many more things that they could have done to you if they feel like it. At this
time, it seems like the fight against the country’s inflation, and the improvement of public
welfare are the only issues that are not on their to-do list, or perhaps, they have no potential to do
anything about those issues.
That one town, as of now, has ceased from being our own.
* * *
This alienated feeling has come and gone from time to time. The first time it happened when I
was really young, around five-year-old. Back then, my parents often took me to visit my
grandparents at their home – which was an attic in the historic downtown, tiny and insanely hot
with a round window in an exquisitely beautiful, antique blue color, which really had nothing to
do with the blotching wallpaper in a room that could not be any smaller. It was a window from
the time of the French colonization.
Back then, I did not know that very window belonged to a sizeable French styled villa. When
“peace” was reestablished in Hanoi, that villa was divided into many smaller sections, and my
grandparents were assigned to the attic. The rest of the villa was designated to the newly
occupying officials who were members of the “take-over” forces.
I remembered that I enthusiastically went to get usable water for my grandparents. I went down
to the water pump, filled up the container, then waddled up the stairs. When I came to the
common courtyard that had an area of about three square meters, in front of a tightly shut room, I
heedlessly put down the container. The water in the uncovered container teetered, tottered, and

5.
poured onto the ground. The door swung open, and a man dashed out. As he looked at the water
on the ground, his face became wrinkly, and he shrieked loudly: “Damn this girl, this girl...”
The five-year-old girl was terrified and stood there motionlessly, her face turned blue (maybe).
Fortunately, her grandfather appeared just in time, said his apology to the neighbor, and took her
back to their home. Afterward, the girl was told by the adults that the neighbor was a police
officer named M., who was very strict. And because it was her who caused the water to pour
onto the ground of the common courtyard right in front of that man’s front door, she therefore
was rightly deserved to be scolded. Since that day, a little girl became frightful, and she often
wondered how could such kind people like her grandparents live together with the awfully mean
police officer who was like a monster to her? She was just being a typical child. Children often
think that the world is full of kind people who would coddle them just like their grandparents and
parents; good people most definitely have to live together with good people.
The little girl had no idea that such villa was no longer belong to her grandparents since the day
the Capitol was liberated.
* * *
I have since grown up, and my grandparents have passed away for a long time now. Their old
villa has become more alienated to me. Occasionally, I found myself thinking of my grandfather
(like at this very moment), and I still remembered the image of me sitting on his lap – he was a
history and math teacher at the Hang Ken school – listening to him whispered dearly in my ears:
“Tell me, my granddaughter, how many kings did the Later Le Dynasty have?” And I would
happily exclaim: “I already know, ‘During the reigns of King Thai To and King Thai Tong;
picking up a child, holding up a child, walking with a child, and carrying a child,' as the
beginning always had to start with King Thai To…” “That’s correct; my granddaughter is so
great. Well then, how many kings did the Nguyen Dynasty have?” “Well, there was Gia Long,
Minh Mang, Thieu Tri…”
My dear grandfather, during your lifetime, had you ever contemplated that your granddaughter
would grow up to be a member of the “social discontent,” “the resistance”, and had been accused
of “subversion of the state’s national security”? Could you ever imagine that a friend of mine, a
young man who loves and studies Vietnamese history very well, is being detained somewhere
“over there” because he participates in a rally to protest against… China’s aggression, my
beloved grandfather?
My brother wrote this poem:
… When will our past come to be our present
For me once again become that little boy, sitting on my grandfather’s lap?
But I don’t know how to write poems. My wish is that my grandparents are still with me… I
would ask them many questions about our country’s history and about Vietnam in the twentieth
century of yore: during the French colonization, the anxious yesteryears before the general
uprising, the 1945 Fall Revolution, the temporary occupancy, the silent resistance of the people
residing within the inner city, the coming of the communist military to the capitol, the signing of

6.
the treaty dividing our country into two separate states, the migration from the North to the
South, the sound of a mother’s crying call for her child, those nights in Kham Thien where fire
consumed and turned the sky red, the celebrated victory, and then the time of those meals with
semolina grains, mixed rice, broken rice, and those food coupons…
And then, I will ask him: My dear grandfather, when one faces the question, to be or not to be
patriotic and attached to our beloved homeland, shall he be?
Written in Hanoi, one empty afternoon on August 21, 2011
http://www.phamdoantrang.com/2014/08/when-autumn-comes-that-one-sad-place-is.html
A young girl cried as she was watching police and "civil order defenders"
cracked down on protesters in Hanoi on August 21, 2011. Photo by Chau Doan